Yahoo's Newspaper Deal Still Buggy

Yahoo!'s deal to handle online ads for 19 newspaper publishers is approaching its first anniversary, and it's still unclear how helpful the partnership will be, reports Reuters. Much of the promised technology hasn't even been built yet, and individual papers may be limited in their options by the size of the consortium.

Analysts say struggling papers should be exploring different kinds of online advertising rather than farming out everything to a single company. "My fear is they're going to think, OK, we've done this deal, we're OK now," says blogger Jeff Jarvis. Others say the papers should be working with more cutting-edge sites like Facebook and MySpace. (More newspaper stories.)